2026-10-12T10:10:12Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/34037043 2026-09-30T21:59:05Z category_27637 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

Data for <b>Trust and Obstacles in Cross-Border Cooperation: What European Experience Tells Us?</b> Hyesong Ha (12235388) Public policy Cross-border Cooperation trust INTERREG A cross-border flows proximity intergroup contact <p dir="ltr">Trust is widely recognized as both a precondition and an outcome of successful cross-border cooperation (CBC) under the EU's <i>INTERREG A</i> framework. Yet, little is known about how the obstacles that citizens perceive in cooperation with their neighbors shape trust, and whether everyday cross-border mobility can soften these effects. Drawing on proximity, social capital, rational choice, and intergroup contact theories, this article examines how five perceived CBC obstacles (accessibility, legal and administrative, socioeconomic, cultural, and language differences) are associated with trust, and whether the intensity of cross-border flows positively moderates, that is, buffers, these associations. Using the EU Cross-Border Cooperation Survey 2020 covering 54 <i>INTERREG A</i> Programs, we estimate ordered logit models of generalized trust and OLS models of comfort-based trust toward cross-border neighbors with both country and program fixed effects. Perceived legal, socioeconomic, cultural, and language differences are consistently and negatively associated with generalized trust, whereas accessibility obstacles reduce comfort-based trust toward neighbors but not generalized trust. Cross-border flow intensity is positively associated with both forms of trust. Its buffering role, however, is selective: flow intensity weakens the negative association between socioeconomic differences and comfort-based trust, while the other obstacle–trust relationships do not vary with mobility. The findings suggest that people-to-people mobility is a trust-building resource, but that relational and cognitive distances require targeted institutional, linguistic, and cultural measures rather than contact alone.</p> 2026-09-30T21:59:05Z Dataset Dataset 10.6084/m9.figshare.34037043.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Data_for_b_Trust_and_Obstacles_in_Cross-Border_Cooperation_What_European_Experience_Tells_Us_b_/34037043 CC BY 4.0